SOURCE: "Justine and the Discourse of the (Other) Master," in Dangerous Truths & Criminal Passions: The Evolution of the French Novel, 1569-1791. Stanford University Press, 1992, pp. 333-74.

In his book Dangerous Truths & Criminal Passions, DiPiero argues that the novel arose as a medium of resistance to accepted literary genres and to the ideological assumptions they served to legitimize. In the following excerpt, he suggests that Sade's narrative strategies in Justine expose the constructed nature of discourse and ideology.

In the marquis de Sade's Justine ou les malbeurs de Is vertu we will see [a] protagonist employ the discursive mode she learns from others. She not only represents herself with the express intent to seduce, but she threatens the security of bourgeois patriarchy's system of values.…

Despite critics' claims that Justine is a novel "in which nothing has been spared," the narrator who opens...